Isle Royale part 2, and we're done!

We just got back from Isle Royale and a short trip to Thunder Bay. We have more sites to survey, but because of the way we get paid, we are not supposed to work past July 10th. SO, Jerry gave our sites away  to other people for them to survey! Hooray! I am free for the rest of the summer, until school starts. It's a Christmas-in-July miracle.

I will try to keep up this blog as an incentive for me to take pictures. This way I will not sleep and eat my way through my month off, but will be forced to do something outside where there is pretty scenery, and take pictures of it, so I can report it to the 4 people who read this. If that's not incentive, I don't know what is.

Here are pictures from Isle Royale!

We had a really intense lightning storm the first night we were out, on Birch Island. The shelter had people in it so we were in a tent. Once the bad lightning started, we thought about running to the shelter but decided against it (I'm not really sure why, because we should have). One really loud CRACK had us sitting bolt upright, and we heard a tearing noise. In the morning we discovered it had hit this tree, about 100 feet away from our tent. YIKES!

The top snapped off and fell in the water.

Later that day, we portaged the heavy aluminum canoe over a mile to Chickenbone Lake. It was SO HOT and I complained constantly (I couldn't help it, every time I opened my mouth some complaint about the heat came out) but once we got to the lake I went swimming, and then swam again, and then again. 

I portaged it too, but for obvious reasons didn't take any pictures of myself. Lizzie did, though, so there's proof if you need to see it to believe that little me did carry that heavy thing. I can hardly believe it myself.

Canoeing at Chickenbone Lake

We got these sweet new drysack/backpack things, but they got holes in them right away. Oh well. They were fun while they lasted.

Lizzie was all excited about fishing, but it was the middle of the day

So she didn't catch anything but weeds

Caddisfly larvae at one of our sites

Canoeing around and looking at birds hardly counts as work!

We made Junket for a 4th of July treat! This is before we cooked it

And after. Red white and blue! The white is marshmallows. We brought the blueberries in a container and kept sticking them in the lake to cool them off, so they would last until the 4th.

With our fun treat. Lizzie didn't like it, actually, but I did. We shared it with some hungry boys that happened upon us so we didn't have to throw the extra Junket out. That would have been a shame.

We got up at 4:30, hiked 3/4 mile to our site, surveyed it, hiked back, and then paddled back to Rock Harbor to catch an 8:00 ferry

We still had time to read Blood Lure before we got on the boat

The lighthouse on the way back from Isle Royale, OH NO we are leaving!

My car after a summer of field work - we went on quite a few adventures!

It is a little messy right now but it was a very organized car for a while

And that's it! Next time you look at my blog you will see similar pictures except for I will be without datasheets or playback devices in my hands. There will probably still be binoculars, though. The bike will hopefully be out of the car instead of in, and I'll be back in the Green Hornet (my little subaru) instead of the Nissan Versa. I will miss having cruise control!